This team is not that team. Texas A&M's season is split into two halves: a rip-roaring nonconference schedule that saw them rise to #5 in the polls and #4 on Kenpom, and a 9-9 SEC season. A&M beat WVU, Oklahoma State, Penn State, and USC away from home and fell narrowly to Arizona in a virtual road game. Then they hit the skids.

The #1 reason for this is the loss of their point guard, Marquette grad transfer Duane Wilson. Wilson went down with an injury after the SEC opener against Alabama; he missed three games, returned as a shadow of himself for nine games in which his eFG was 33%, and finally went out for the season on February 13th.

Per Bart Torvik's system, A&M was the #14 team in the country before Wilson went out the first time and #35 after, largely because of a drop in defensive efficiency. In the nine-game sample since Wilson went out for the second and final time they're 82nd, and their offense is also languishing in that precise spot. This includes their hamblasting of UNC.

A&M had a brief section of the season where a spate of injuries took down Wilson, DJ Hogg, and Admon Gilder for 3-6 game stretches but they've been healthy outside of the Wilson injury for a couple months now and their performance has been iffy.

Starks is the rare 30 usage, 90 ORTG guy

Maybe try a man bun? In Wilson's absence A&M has turned to freshman TJ Starks, the aforementioned Dollar Store Rob Gray. Like Gray, Starks is a 6'2" PG with 30 percent usage and a healthy assist rate. There the comparisons stop. Starks has a TO rate higher than his assist rate and is shooting 43/33 from the floor with a mediocre free-throw rate. He's had at least 4 TOs in 10 of his last 11 games and aside from one anomaly against Vanderbilt hasn't gotten his ORTG above 106 during that span. On the season he's at 88, and there is no recent upward trend.

Starks is completely bonkers, and I have the stat to prove it. Despite spending much of the year as a backup he leads A&M with 92 transition attempts. eFG on those? 41%. IE, worse than his half court offense.

A&M's highest usage guy is by far their least efficient. Not a great combination.

Large, though. This team is even bigger than the SDSU team that veritably loomed as a potential second-round matchup. A&M's 6th in the country in effective height because they roll out three 6'10" guys and a 6'9" guy. The 6'9" guy, Hogg, would be a stretch four in a normal line up—he's hitting 38% on 167 threes. He is A&M's small forward by necessity.

The 6'10" guys are pure posts without much stretch to them. Tonny Trocha-Morelos gets up about 2 3PA per game and hits at 31%; other than that threes from the bigs are bad-idea shots that occasionally go up anyway. Trocha-Morelos is a dunk-on-dish guy at the rim; Tyler Davis and Robert Williams both have significant post-up game. I'd expect a bunch of Duncan Robinson post D events. Ditto Wagner.

As you might expect, this old-school approach leads to a lot of backboard volleyball. A&M is 30th in OREBs and near 300th in both 3PA/FGA and 3P%.

A&M runs. Per Synergy, 19% of A&M possessions are in transition and while they're not great (58th percentile) they are a ton better than they are in the half court, where they score just 0.84 points per possession against man to man D—22nd percentile.

By contrast, just 11% of opponent shots against Michigan are in transition and Michigan is the best team in the country at defending even the small number of runouts that they endure.

And they D up. A&M doesn't have any real weaknesses on defense. The worst aspect of their D is that about 26% of opposition shots are spot-ups and they're only a little bit above average at defending those. Everything else is very good to excellent. There is a glaring issue on Kenpom, as A&M is in the 300s at forcing turnovers, but they're so good at everything else it doesn't really matter. As you might imagine, they block a lot of shots—8th nationally.

The Aggies are mostly a man team but do run out a 2-3 zone on about a fifth of their possessions. Michigan is definitely going to get some of that early and possibly a lot of it if Michigan bogs down against it. With traditional bigs at the 4 and 5 chasing around Wagner, Robinson, and Livers it might be A&M's plan from the drop.

tfw you're shooting 6% from 3

What happened against North Carolina? A perfect storm of three point luck. UNC started out the game 1/17, A&M started 7/17. By the time the game ended those numbers had expanded to 6/31 and 10/24. A&M's three point defense is good enough to assume that some of it is real skill, but nobody's got true skill to hold UNC to 19%, and anyone who watched that game can tell you that most of UNC's looks were high quality.

Meanwhile, A&M hit 42% and launched 40% of their shots from three.

The two point stats are also slanted heavily in A&M's favor but that was in large part because the three point shooting had sunk UNC so far down that they started getting desperate with 10+ minutes left. UNC threw up a ton of quick, bad shots; they pressed to open up a bunch of A&M dunks.

It looks like just one of those things, a ruthless run of bad luck on both ends of the court for the Tarheels. I would not expect one part of that—A&M's mad bombing—to continue against a team like Michigan that just shut down catch-and-shoot threes against Houston and is top ten at preventing launches on the season. Unfortunately, it is easy to project Michigan building a mighty wall of bricks, since it seems like they do about every other game even when they're not facing a team of huge dudes.

General shape of game. This is going to be another slugfest. A&M is going to dump it in to their big guys and dare Michigan not to double them, both because they're excellent at posting and Michigan has weak post defense and because they might get a foul on Wagner that would limit his ability to stretch A&M's defense out of shape.

Not to offer Luke Yaklich advice but I might be inclined to double much harder than Michigan has to date. Anything that forces Starks to create is probably better for M than post-ups despite the latter's inherent inefficiency. None of the A&M bigs have much in the way of an assist rate. And keeping Wagner on the floor should be a major priority given the issues A&M's defense presents.

When Michigan has the ball I'd expect a brief period of chasing Robinson off screens and trying to deal with pick and pop with Wagner before A&M settles in and plays a 2-3 zone for most of the game. Who hates that idea? This guy.

Michigan should have an edge in shot volume since A&M is pretty bad in all TO departments and Michigan's been proficient on the defensive boards; they should have a big edge in 3PAs. It'll come down to how much Michigan's defense is hurt by a couple of very legit post-up bigs versus Michigan hitting an acceptable number of threes.

It's a list I don't even have to keep, because it is so narrow. A list gets written down. When you can count the number of persons given TOP SECRET access to the HUG PROTOCOL on your hands—and you could probably have had a finger lopped off in a bag accident and still gotten by—it's not really a list. It's an iron-clad fact of life. The hug protocol is buried deep behind passcodes and false leads and a butler who keeps the secret in a tattoo behind his ear.

So here are the persons that I have engaged in uncompuncted, mutually enthusiastic, joyous hug activities with before this weekend:

my parents

my brother

my wife

my son

a guy who I can confidently state was from the Indian subcontinent and think was probably Pakistani in the King's Head, a bar in Galway, Ireland, when Robbie Keane scores against Germany during the 2002 World Cup; our hug occurs largely because everyone else in the bar was Irish and we were the dudes left over

I spent the 1998 Rose Bowl amongst very wrong people. When Trey Burke hit The Shot 1.0 there was still a lot of work to do; fist-pumping and guttural Viking cries were the order of the day. Jumping up and down in a pile, not so much. That shot just swung Michigan from certain defeat to potential defeat. Burke, of course, made damn sure his moment wasn't wasted. That still took some time.

It's a different thing, being rescued half-way.

Jordan Poole (and Isaiah Livers and Muhammad Ali Abdur-Rahkman) rescued Michigan all the way, draining the very last tenth of a second off the clock in doing so. And, man, 100% is an entirely different feeling than 95%. Ask a Houston fan today, or yourself a few months ago during the Maryland game when Isaiah Livers dropped a dime on MAAR in an eerily similar situation. MAAR got to the line, swinging Michigan's win probability from LOL NOPE to PRETTY DANG LIKELY. And the main thing to feel was a restricted, conditional hope; after the android version of MAAR nailed both free throws the new feeling was relief.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Things that would make a win probability chart fold in on itself. My first reaction when I saw the thing the NIT's quarters did…

…to the Louisville-Northern Kentucky game on Kenpom was "this is the most accurate chart." If your sports life doesn't feel like that I don't know you. 95, 96, 97… these are not 100. 100 is 100, and only 100 is 100.

4 to 100 in 3.6 seconds is when the hug protocol is broken out and the room becomes a single hopping organism for a solid 20 seconds. At the same time, Poole is displaying his lateral agility by temporarily escaping the on-court pile. The walk-ons track him down, because walk-ons are crafty by necessity, and then you get the sports picture.

Afterwards, twitter is checked and re-checked. Poole talks to the media, and then John Beilein says Poole has an "overdose of swag."

(It is only a matter of time before he invades the locker room in a firefighting mech.) Over the next 36 hours, Michigan's entire half of the bracket commits seppuku. It's all in front of them, and they didn't even play particularly well.

Take a breath. Enjoy it for what it is, right now. Down big to UCLA this looked like an NIT outfit, and now they're here. Sun yourself. Bask, until you have reached your swag limit, and then bask just a little more. Weekends like this stand on their own.

[JD Scott]

BULLETS

The other side. Devin Davis feels horrible today despite exceeding his season average on free throws, because the makes and misses came in the worst possible order. Wagner gave him a thought…

I really enjoyed watching Houston’s Corey Davis compete. And then he suffered this. Man. But then a classy move from Mo Wagner. What a way to finish in Wichita. pic.twitter.com/CHZqeq7lWp

45 minutes after the game, Houston's Devin Davis (who missed two FT's with 4 seconds left) is on the court, alone at the FT line. Michigan wins on a buzzer-beating three-pointer. #MarchMadnesspic.twitter.com/I8DYNVMjM7

THE DOOR OPENS. You may be aware of this already, but: Michigan is the highest seed remaining on their half of the bracket after the ignominious demises of Xavier, North Carolina, Virginia, Cincinnati, and Tennessee.

This doesn't mean you should be disappointed if Michigan isn't in the national title game. Everyone is good at this point, and there are no home games unless you're Kansas. A&M over UNC was most welcome but Kenpom gives M a 62% chance against the Aggies—it is anything but a slam dunk to get to the Final Four.

Still… coulda, coulda been worse. #7 Gonzaga and #16 Kentucky are the top teams Michigan can face on the way to the title game. All those teams above are gonzo, and there's a decent chance Michigan beats A&M and gets a team (Florida State) that's currently one slot behind Penn State in Kenpom.

Going to have to do better, though. Michigan is going to run into a team that can score adequately on them despite their excellent defense, and at that point they're going to have to get back to Big Ten Tournament-level offense or they're going to crash out. Michigan's weekend was ugly, ugly stuff. More analysis later. I tried to start writing analysis and, nope, let's hold off on that for a second here.

“The long shorts are out of date,” the sophomore Ibi Watson said. “If they can touch your knees, they’re way too long.”

It is said that fashion is cyclical. The irony is that the same program that bucked the trend by concealing its legs in the 1990s is helping bring skin back in now.

In fact, players on Michigan, seeded third in the West region and set to play Montana in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament on Thursday night, lamented that they can’t get find shorts that are quite revealing enough.

The pundits preached patience before the season, but what was supposed to take a few seasons took just one: Mel Pearson and his staff have guided Michigan to an NCAA tournament berth in their first season behind the bench. The appearance will be Michigan’s second in the last six seasons.

Northeastern is Pairwise’s highest-ranked three-seed. Northeastern finished the season with 23 wins, including a relatively impressive (based on the rest of the bodybags on their schedule) home-and-home sweep of Boston University in November, a one-off win at Boston College in December, and wins over both schools in February’s Beanpot tournament. They also took Pairiwse no. 7 Providence to overtime in a home-and-home series in January and again in the Hockey East semis.

Northeastern’s powered by an explosive first line, good goaltending, and a high dose of Michigan’s kryptonite. Their top line of Nolan Stevens, Adam Gaudette, and Dylan Sikura put up 41, 59, and 52 points, respectively. Gaudette and Sikura are also both Hobey Baker top-ten finalists. Goaltender Cayden Primeau has a .932 SV%, including a stellar .936 at even strength and .906 when down a man. Northeastern also features the nation’s third-best power play at 27.2%, which is the highest % power play in the tournament fold and the absolute last thing you want to see if you wear a block-M sweater.

Facing Northeastern in the Northeast Regional is a fairly heavy-handed hint at Michigan’s other opponent: geography. Northeastern’s campus is a brisk 52-minute drive from the DCU Center. Should Michigan advance, they would face either one-seed Cornell (Pairwise #3) or four-seed Boston University (Pairwise #15) on Sunday. Boston University’s campus is an even closer drive than Northeastern’s (by two minutes), and they’ve recently found a way to get all their talent on the same page, surging to a Hockey East title by way of victories over Boston College and eventual two-seed Providence. Cornell may have more overall wins, but considering location, top-end talent, recent results, and the all-important PP%, Michigan might rather face Cornell for a shot at the Frozen Four.

We are back at the Residence Inn Ann Arbor Downtown where the conference rooms are fortunately safe right now since 1 seeds apparently can lose to Rutgers-level teams now.

We Couldn’t Have One Without the Other

We can do this because people support us. You should support them too so they’ll want to do it again next year! The show is presented by UGP & The Bo Store, and if it wasn’t for Rishi and Ryan there would be VERY long hiatuses between podcasts.

1. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! the Houston Game

starts at 1:00

Even while not handing out bags John Beilein is among the most successful coaches in the country. Naming a Top 10 without him becomes impossible. Tommy Amaker? Borderline Top 5, obvious Top 10, hard-pressed to find a better tactician. Breaking down The Shot II. The walk-ons are so crafty at post-buzzer beater dogpile tactical moves you wonder if they’ve been coached on that too. The game before that was a #refshow. Other than that: defense continued to be superlative. Want to see Simpson create more—Houston forced drives to the baseline. Weird shots—CM gets his but a lot of great shots rolled out.

2. Unnnnngggghhhhhhh the Montana Game

starts at 30:32

Least fun 14-point victory in tournament history. At one point Montana’s offense was so out of ideas that the tried to post up their 6’8” Big Sky bigs on Teske. In a slugfart game when you need someone to barely scrape the lower reaches of offensive adequacy Charles Matthews is your man. Let’s not get in that situation again. Wagner and MAAR had bad weekends; need better to beat North Carolina Texas A&M.

3. Gimmicky Top 5: Wild Emotional Swings

starts at 43:59

Doesn’t have to be sports but 9/10 are sports because who are you talking to? Jordan Poole shot is not eligible. Glorious trollface steal, the 2002 Red Wings-Vancouver series. The Shot. UTL1. Also some sad things.

4: Ace’s Hockey Podcast (wsg David Nasternak AND Ace Anbender)

starts at 59:36

It’s the #8 overall seed which means 2 seed, which means you get an ECAC team instead of the #1 overall seat in your part of the bracket. Northeastern: eerily similar to Michigan two years ago. Second-worst at puck possession. They have son of Keith Primeau. (why not MSU or another Michigan team?) and the Hobey leader—Michigan’s awful PK unit means whistles matter a lot. Cornell on the other side: super old players, play a lock system, goalie with super-high SV%. Unless it’s BU, which is super-talented high draft picks but not well-coached.

It didn't matter that he'd made only two of his 13 three-point attempts in the month of March. It didn't matter that Michigan had gone 7-for-29 from beyond the arc in the game. It didn't matter that the game had been a brutal slog of a refshow. It didn't matter that Michigan had to inbound the ball from under their own basket. It didn't matter that Poole's view of the basket was so obscured he didn't see if the shot fell. It didn't matter that he's just a freshman.

Poole was born for this. With time about to expire, he took a sharp pass from MAAR, squared up, and fired. With a defender in his face, he struck the Jordan pose as he released the shot, then fell to the ground. Our hero arose and... ran for his life:

"After the shot went in I didn't know it went in," said Poole. "I looked at the bench. I was always thinking if I hit a shot like that I didn't want to get tackled. So I was kind of trying to avoid everybody, but I gave up and they tackled me and it was an amazing experience."

Instead of a heartbreaking early tournament exit to end the Michigan careers of MAAR, Duncan Robinson, and possibly Moe Wagner, the Wolverines move on to their second straight Sweet Sixteen in the most unimaginable way.

To everyone but Poole, that is. The young man had even planned his exit strategy.